The central mission of the College of Chemistry is to advance society through education and research, and we have made it our responsibility to fulfill this mission, year in and year out, for more than 140 years.

Our two departments provide fundamental and applied studies of an outstanding caliber. The remarkable breadth and depth of resources available to our students readies them as chemists and chemical engineers to address society’s most urgent 21st-century issues.

College faculty have been leaders at the frontiers of knowledge since 1872. Current pioneering research includes premier programs in catalysis, thermodynamics, chemical biology, atmospheric chemistry, the development of polymer, optical and semiconductor materials, and nanoscience, among others.

The College of Chemistry is consistently ranked as one of the best places on earth to learn, teach, and create new tools in the chemical sciences. This is no accident. It’s the direct result of exceptional scholarship as well as thousands and thousands of donations from our loyal alumni and friends.

November 8, 2017

Professor Omar M. Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair and Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley was presented with the Albert Einstein World Award at a ceremony today in Amsterdam at Leiden University. This prize is sponsored by the World Cultural Council.

November 3, 2017

The UC Berkeley ChemE squad has won the 2017 National Chemical Engineering Jeopardy Championship at the AIChE Student Conference. This version of the Jeopardy Game utilizes questions from chemical engineering undergraduate coursework to test the knowledge of college teams from across the country.

October 30, 2017

In a new study, appearing in the November 2017 issue of Nature Materials, a research team led by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Naomi S. Ginsberg, has announced the development and implementation of the most direct method to-date to track the nanoscale process of energy flow that punctuates the initial picoseconds after light absorption in some natural and artificial light harvesting systems. The research results are also available online at the Nature Materials website.

Almost 300 science writers and journalists from 70 countries spent Sunday getting to know UC Berkeley's best scientific minds as part of the five-day World Conference of Science Journalists. The group had easy, intimate access to experts like Jennifer Doudna and Omar Yaghi.

October 23, 2017

Nobel Laureate Yuan T. Lee, an emeritus professor at Berkeley who won the Nobel Prize for research in particle chemistry in 1986, and was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate, will speak as part of a group of laureates at the Drive for the Nobel Prize conference at UC Berkeley on October 31st.

October 18, 2017

Dean Toste, Professor of Chemistry and a Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award. Professor Toste was nominated for this award by Prof. Dr. Dirk Trauner of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.

October 17, 2017

When our new chancellor, Carol Christ, came on board this last summer she announced five goals for UC Berkeley. Chancellor Christ's goal of enhancing the student experience is also a top goal for us here at the College of Chemistry!

Department of Chemistry FSA Leslie Dietterick is the October 2017 recipient of the Chemistry Achievement Prize. Leslie has worked in the Department of Chemistry for over two years and is a Faculty Support Administrator (FSA) supporting Professors Phillip Geissler and Eran Rabani.

October 16, 2017

Scientists were treated to near-simultaneous observations by separate instruments: One set of Earth-based detectors measured the signature of a cataclysmic event sending ripples through the fabric of space-time, and a space-based detector measured the gamma-ray signature of a high-energy outburst emanating from the same region of the sky.

October 9, 2017

Behind the headlines was the work of two Berkeley Lab groups specializing in developing tools and applications for moving and managing data and allowing scientists around the world to access and analyze the information.